It didn’t attract much notice at the time, but one of the first moves of the new president of Harvard University, Drew Gilpin Faust, was to write to the chief of the union of British academics that was proposing a boycott of Israeli professors and universities. According to a statement from Ms. Faust’s office, she wrote the letter on her second day on the job at Harvard, expressing her own “conviction that such a move subverts the academic values and freedoms necessary to the free flow of ideas that are the lifeblood of universities and, ultimately, that of the societies and world we serve.”

Ms. Faust’s statement said that she joins “many colleagues throughout the international academic community in denouncing unequivocally an action that would serve no purpose and would fundamentally violate the academic freedoms we must defend at all costs.” It was a milder statement than the one from the president of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, who called the proposed boycott an “intellectually shoddy and politically biased” attempt “to hijack the central mission of higher education.” But it nonetheless made clear where Ms. Faust stood in respect of fair treatment of Israel.